Though I normally try to dodge advertisements (especially now because we're in election (= silly) season in the US), I have to say the BBC promo for the Olympics was quite good. FWIW by the way, congratulations to GB for hosting a wonderful Olympic games.

Yep - though the BBC don't carry advertisements (i.e. commercials), and there's no sponsorship of shows either, in between programmes we just have trails for other BBC shows - so not an issue for us here.

The HSB sounds great and as you said, if business happens to take me to SF at the time I'd love to attend. As a more likely near-term alternative, I think our local Underground Music Showcase in Denver has grown enough to potentially attract a band like Elbow. Sadly UMS isn't free, but historically the price has been more than reasonable relative to amount of music one can take in over four days. http://www.theums.com/

Thank you for this (One has to love the powerful brain trust within AVS) . Beyond playback during the closing ceremony I also found their video of Open Arms very interesting. I'll keep an eye on this group.
Update: I just listened to Elbow's concert in Manchester Cathedral-Wow! Hopefully I'll be able to catch them live in the US or UK sometime...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQGwXIYjTM&feature=player_detailpage

WOW this has been bothering me for the last week or so, I watched the closing ceremonies and thought man that sounds like Elbow at the end but wasn't too sure until now! Sorry I haven't read the rest of the post on here so sorry if you guys are talking about some elbow issues with one of the Olympians but I doubt it with Youtube video on here...

I guess ESPN aren't doing it right... My experience of the BBC Olympic stuff on an 18Mbs ADSL2+ connection in the UK was very positive.

They did quite a good test trial for Wimbledon (a secondary service for people to betatest) and got useful feedback. The BBC Internet Blog is often used by BBC tech teams to engage with their viewers and listeners and to gain useful (and high quality in many cases) feedback.

With the Olympics, broadcasters pay big money and thus are protective of those rights. Since interest in the Paralympics is considerably lower than the Olympics, I wonder if the few streams will be less region restrictive. Personally, I will probably only watch the opening ceremonies if I can find it somewhere tomorrow.

With the Olympics, broadcasters pay big money and thus are protective of those rights. Since interest in the Paralympics is considerably lower than the Olympics, I wonder if the few streams will be less region restrictive. Personally, I will probably only watch the opening ceremonies if I can find it somewhere tomorrow.

The Paralympics are being treated pretty big in the UK. AIUI the Beijing Paralympics sold 180,000 spectator tickets. The London Paralympics have already sold 2,200,000... Channel Four in the UK are going wall-to-wall with their coverage - so we have another morning-to-night channel covering the games, plus an additional 3 live streams on Red Button/web.

Thanks for the Youtube link. It is much better than the typical crappy pirated streams out there. I had no idea Youtube was even streaming it.

I think for the Beijing Paralympics, they were throwing numbers like 1.8 million. That is probably a paper number though. Seats were offered on-the-cheap. What was not sold was probably just given away to whoever wanted them. Are they pricing tickets in GB very low as well? Obviously, I would not expect the cost to be anywhere near what was charged for the Olympics.

It would be interesting to hear what kind of tv ratings this gets over there. Here in the U.S., NBC would probably not even bother showing highlights of these games on their minor sports network if they thought they could get away with it.

UK broadcaster Channel Four's broadcast of the Paralympic Opening ceremony got an average of 7.7million viewers, peaking at around 11million. The highest ratings on Channel Four in 10 years.

They're showing wall-to-wall coverage on Channel Four or More 4 (with Channel Four HD running constant coverage all day). There are three additional HD and SD satellite and cable streams (in a similar manner to the BBC's 24 HD and SD streams for the Olympics)

I think the unauthorized stream I saw was actually Channel 4. Person who was with me at the time kept complaining about the commercials. Also it appeared that during the nations march, they quickly went to a commercial when the other big 2 (U.S. and China) arrived. However, GB got what seemed like 5 minutes. The later is probably expected though because the broadcast was geared to that audience.

I think the unauthorized stream I saw was actually Channel 4. Person who was with me at the time kept complaining about the commercials. Also it appeared that during the nations march, they quickly went to a commercial when the other big 2 (U.S. and China) arrived. However, GB got what seemed like 5 minutes. The later is probably expected though because the broadcast was geared to that audience.

Are you referring to the YouTube video? I only watched about 5 minutes of it - Canadians actually got to watch the ceremony on TV and in HD -- live with French commentary, and a few hours later in English (TSN2). Interesting that the link was posted on CTVOlympics.ca by Bell Media, which is a Canadian rights holder. So they linked visitors to an unauthorized stream?

American propaganda tonight .... . NBC promised the USA-Brazil Women's Volleyball Final in prime-time tonight -- on tape of course.

Fact: The match was played earlier -- the USA won the first set, but Brazil stormed back to win the next three sets, and therefore the Gold Medal.

NBC knew this, and they know many people already found out during the afternoon. So they've chosen to shuffle their evening line up to hide this disappointment (apparently people love to see their athletes win, but not when they're losing) .So NBC show all the exciting track and field races in the stadium (even the one race that the Jamaicans won -- spending 15 minutes on it alone) , and all six rounds of the Platform diving (won by an American -- 30 minutes of coverage). The volleyball game, which was lost, was buried to 11:26 pm to 11:50 pm, just 24 minutes of airtime (including commercials).

And it is interesting what they have chosen to show to their audience: They showed the second half of the first set (won by the Americans). Then they took a commercial break, then cue David Gregory to talk briefly about tomorrow's "Meet The Press". Then back to the volleyball ... they've fast forwarded past the next two sets won by the Brazilians (didn't explain why such a turnaround), and right to the final 6 minutes of the fourth set -- by that time the game was out of reach by the Americans. Why? Nobody explained.

Such disrespect for the Champions !!! When the team shook hands, the commentators said the Brazilians were underdogs, and repeated as two-time Olympic Champions. Again, no explanation. Then seemingly to pour cold water over the Brazilians, they showed two minutes of highlights of their Soccer defeat at the hands of the Mexicans. Then back to show their American Diver receiving the Gold Medal (but not the silver and bronze winners beside him!) , and the broadcast ended with "Stars Spangled Banner", Such a strange and unbalanced presentation.

I know... this is a story about something that happened about a year ago! But believe it or not, I only got to watch it for myself last night. I've been "slowly working my way through all the HDTV coverage" of last summer's Olympics (including producing commercial-free clips for all actual competition shown on copy-freely NBC), which for me included everything presented on NBCSN, MSNBC, and NBC. That was almost 700 hours of recorded TV via Windows Media Center (on several external 2TB USB drives) and quite frankly I have other things to do.

Anyway, I'm finally down to the final two days of the 2012 Olympics... including this insult to NBC viewers that occurred on that final Saturday night in the edited presentation of the Gold Medal match for women's indoor volleyball. Like you, I couldn't believe it... I thought I accidentally fell asleep while watching when after the commercial break at the very end of the first set (which of course the USA women won handily) it was suddenly 2-1 Brazil and we were almost done with the fourth set with Brazil again pummeling the US women in what would be the final set. I thought I'd just come through a time warp and had lost at least an hour of my life! Of course I already knew something was wrong when they saved the TV coverage for the final 25 minutes of the night

So NBC gave us maybe 15 minutes total (including commercials) of the Gold Medal match, and spared us just about the entire ignominy of the US loss, for this "event final" coverage which had received so many many hours of coverage of many many preliminary matches throughout the previous two weeks. I know... too bad the US women lost. But this was the Gold Medal match!!!

Therefore, even one year later, I have to add my own comment here... about one more terrible injustice to sports fans done by that NBC Sports network decision on that final Saturday night, to editorially minimize the US loss in a high-profile event.

DSperber, you really had to go digging to pull this one out of the graveyard. Did you happen to check the date of the last post on this thread, before replying to and making it a Zombie thread.

Absolutely! Had to "search" to find this thread. I know it was from Summer 2012.

But I had to find the appropriate forum to vent my rage at NBC for how they handled a match I was really looking forward to watching and finally got to see... albeit a year after it happened!! And this thread was that place.

And I was at least pleasantly surprised to see that JCL had made exactly the same observations last summer that I did last night... and was equally outraged at NBC's programming decisions on that final night of competition.

Anyway, it's long gone now.

But I will make one more final comment on event coverage (since I've now finally gotten to watch EVERYTHING that was broadcast on those three channels for the entire two weeks)... I was REALLY surprised at how much I enjoyed the Equestrian events, and especially the "free style" final in the second week that I thought was beautiful. I'd also never seen the cross-country portion of the "team eventing" in the first week until this Olympics, and it was just thrilling, and lovely to look at in HD.